Complex IT environments contain numerous products and applications that work in a delicate harmony. Administration and configuration of these systems needs to be managed on these products as well as between numerous products. Using modeling to predict applications performance under various possible hardware and software configurations is used in Capacity Management (CM) processes. Modeling saves time and provides a reduction of the cost required to buy and setup the recommended hardware alternatives, and the test the recommended alternatives by running a test load on them. Modeling, however, faces particular challenges. Analytical approaches to QNMs are relatively fast, but unfortunately are limited to simple QNMs that likely do not adequately represent the complex IT environment. Unfortunately, the complexity of multiple interacting processes running on multiple hardware resources in a complex IT environment makes performance prediction and capacity planning difficult. Complex IT environments that comprise distributed systems are inherently difficult to analyze, and this difficulty becomes even more challenging when the environment includes “black-box” components such as software from different vendors, usually with no source code or instrumentation available. Traditional QNMs generated by most existing tools are complex and the model complexity grows with system complexity.